Anna Muenchrath, PhD (she/her)
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annamuenchrath.bsky.social
Anna Muenchrath, PhD (she/her)
@annamuenchrath.bsky.social
1K followers 1.1K following 120 posts
Academic studying 20-21 C. World Lit and Book/Media History.

Books: Making World Literature (UMass Press) and Selling Books With Algorithms (Cambridge UP)

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annamuenchrath.bsky.social
November 6, 2025 at 2:08 PM
annamuenchrath.bsky.social
Admin / assistant professor / grad student
Andy Reid sitting next to Travis Kelce and Patrick Mahomes for an interview.
October 8, 2025 at 4:24 PM
annamuenchrath.bsky.social
do people feel disgust at people who clap when planes land? misanthropic ennui punctuated with homicidal rage, yes, but disgust?
June 23, 2025 at 5:12 PM
annamuenchrath.bsky.social
The chapters consider different literary institutions as hubs and consider how they anchor networks that produce different structures of relationships among books, readers, and authors.
May 27, 2025 at 1:42 PM
annamuenchrath.bsky.social
chaotic evil
a product photo of a ridiculous bookshelf with shelves going at odd angles
May 23, 2025 at 6:27 PM
annamuenchrath.bsky.social
So excited to be part of what looks to be an excellent symposium on transnational literary production and consumption in the digital age. It's online so register if you're interested!

forms.office.com/e/zeMucwgpiB
Poster for an event on June 17th, 7am to 9:30am eastern time. The program lists five talks by Dr. Xiang Ren, myself, Dr. Heather Inwood, Dr. Ling Ge, and Dr. Peng Qiao.
May 21, 2025 at 1:19 PM
annamuenchrath.bsky.social
It sounds like the MLA is updating its constitution to allow discussion of the resolution?
Dear Professor Muenchrath, Please forgive the detail of this reply, but I want to make sure you have all the information you need. The Executive Council has put in motion all the steps needed to be sure the governance process is changed so that all resolutions can be debated and voted on at the Delegate Assembly. They are making sure the MLA constitution is amended to return to that process. I would hate for you to miss out on the prize competition, given that everything is in motion to allow for the conditions you seek. Governance is a deliberate process, for good reason. The constitution cannot be changed easily or quickly. But please know that the council has charged the Committee on Amendments to the Constitution to make the change you desire. Please let me know whether you will allow your book to be considered, given that information.
April 22, 2025 at 2:03 PM
annamuenchrath.bsky.social
I hated having to write this email. The world is too much at the moment.
Thank you for your email. I regret that the book copies were sent to you; I asked my publisher to submit my book Making World Literature to the MLA’s Prize for a First Book prior to the publication of MLA's Report to the MLA Delegate Assembly [ ] of December 16, 2024. Since then, I have pledged not to renew my membership until MLA allows a discussion and vote on the resolution. At the end of Making World Literature I write, "In the sense that it allows us to think of our choices and affiliations as occurring in the context of a world that will be shaped by them en masse, networks help us realize that choice is not something we should abdicate as something outside of our control. We cannot self-select our circumstances, but what we can select, we must and we must do so with care, alacrity, and an understanding of the power that enforces the protocols of the networks in which we operate. . . . [T]he power of institutions is a result of the aggregated agency of individuals over the course of history.” Although I understand the forces that have shaped the MLA Executive Council’s actions, I also believe and hope that institutions like the MLA can be shaped by the choices of individuals and by the influence of institutions like Harvard who have, since that December 16th report, come out in opposition to the federal government's efforts to silence dissent and force academic institutions to align with its own, very narrow and ideologically compromising protocols. I appreciate the function of the MLA, particularly in its efforts to support the work of early career scholars with the prize for a first book. That support, however, becomes less meaningful when it comes at the cost of compromising our academic freedom. If all of our institutions take the route that the MLA has, ultimately the book prize will be an empty award—promoting only work that aligns with protocols that should be unacceptable to those engaged in supporting critical thought and the study of humanity.
April 21, 2025 at 3:32 PM
annamuenchrath.bsky.social
Finishing up the slides for a talk on time, algorithms, books, and labor tomorrow at 10am EDT.

booksellingresearchnet.uk/event/anna-m...
Slide showing outline: 1 Algorithms and Time as Data, 2 The User and Time as Labor, 3 The Warehouse Associate and Making Rate, 4 Just Browsing with Algorithms, 5 Time for your comments!
March 27, 2025 at 4:09 PM
annamuenchrath.bsky.social
working on a particularly ovine slide and getting excited for this talk on time and the online bookstore.
A slide showing three images: one of sheep browsing, one of people browsing in a bookstore, and one of a person browsing on a computer.
March 25, 2025 at 3:45 PM
annamuenchrath.bsky.social
working on an essay on speculative fiction and AI in education and stumbled upon this 🔥🔥🔥 from @alienmeans.bsky.social on "platform learning and on-demand labor."
Lastly, platform learning circumscribes our capacity to envision the future. I would argue that the strategic forecasts of IFTF and KW reflect what I call a paradox of possibility immanent to the evol- ving techno-cultural logics of late capitalism. Namely, society is now rife with truly radical visions of technological transformation from super-intelligent AI to human-machine symbiosis. However, our collective capacity to imagine and discuss potential transformations of political economy remain stunted. Perhaps we need to update Fredric Jameson’s famous quip that it is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism. Today, it is easier to imagine we live in a hyperreal com- puter simulation, where our every movement, thought, feeling, and action becomes an optimizable data point, than to imagine we can make basic modifications to our systems of endless accumulation and labor exploitation. Platform learning embodies this paradox in the sense that it envisions a rad- ical transformation of education and work through technology, but this radical transformation is limited to serving the prevailing neoliberal logics of accumulation and precarity by subsuming the distinctions between learning, earning, and living. This is a form of learning to labor for a narrow future dominated by the moral and structural constraints set by capitalism. Critical scholars need to assess and deconstruct the ideological dynamics of learning for work and working to live so as to open up alternative sociotechnical projections and imaginaries. Numerous emancipatory possibi- lities for artificial intelligence and data processing could be charted via proliferation of postcapitalist and postwork visions of learning, labor, and life.
December 30, 2024 at 4:51 PM
annamuenchrath.bsky.social
From Dylan Mulvin's Proxies on voter rolls as data
At the forefront of voter suppression in the United States is an opportunistic interpretation of what constitutes “dirt” in a data set, as well as conflicting norms over hygienic protocols for maintaining clean data. Evident in this case is the fact that the meaning of extraneous data is a contested area; there is a political stake in categorizing list items, and political actors develop highly choreographed rituals to justify these categorizations.
December 18, 2024 at 7:08 PM